Black Shack Alley
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
The semiautobiographical Caribbean novel that explores shifting race relations in early twentieth-century colonial Martinique, with a foreword by Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau
A Penguin Classic
Following in the tradition of Richard Wright's Black Boy, Joseph Zobel's semiautobiographical 1950 novel Black Shack Alley chronicles the coming-of-age of José, a young boy grappling with issues of power and identity in colonial Martinique. As José transitions from childhood to young adulthood and from rural plantations to urban Fort-de-France on a quest for upward mobility, he bears witness to and struggles against the various manifestations of white supremacy, both subtle and overt, that will alter the course of his life. His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M'man Tine, who fights her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. Zobel's masterpiece, the basis for the award-winning film Sugar Cane Alley directed by Euzhan Palcy, is a powerful testament to twentieth-century life in Martinique, with a foreword by award-winning Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This classic of West Indian literature from Zobel (1915 2006) is the heady semiautobiographical account of Jos , a young boy of francophone creole ancestry navigating life on the island of Martinique in the early 20th century. Jos dwells in Black Shack Alley, a decrepit ghetto adjacent to the thriving sugarcane plantation; most of the Alley's inhabitants work there or at the factory just beyond the horizon, a reminder of their children's all-but-certain fate as laborers. Jos , raised by his strict but loving grandmother, lives on guava and calabash, runs wild with his friends, listens to the storyteller Medouze's zombi tales, and absorbs a m lange of Christianity and African religious traditions. But above all, he craves acceptance from the "mysterious world" of the adults and the scornful B k whites. Jos manages to escape Black Shack Alley for school, with the help of his determined mother. Soon after his First Communion, he receives a rare scholarship to a prestigious lyc e in the cosmopolitan city of Fort-de-France. There, he finds himself torn between his squalid childhood and his promising future as a writer. Zobel relays Jos 's pain and frustration in measured, matter-of-fact prose. This perfectly captures the education of an outsider in the shadow of colonization.
